Folklore and Pop Culture

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Logan May Ms. Martha Sims English 2367 1-31-13 Writing Project #1: Folklore or Pop Culture? Due to heavy casualties brought during some of the most infamous battles in the Texas Revolution, Anglo-Texans were quickly able to draw their emotions towards Mexicans and their culture. According to Montano, they were also quick to draw the conclusion that since they were such an inferior race to Anglo-Texans, so was their cuisine. It was determined that their cuisine was too rich in spices and had poor quality meat and therefore unfit for human consumption. The negative and derogatory assumptions about Mexicans and their cuisine lead to many derogatory slanders towards their culture such as “Chillis” or “Beaners”, all strangely deriving from their food ways and no other aspects of their culture, according to Montano. Although Mexican cuisine had been considered for years to be unworthy and unacceptable to the dominant culture,it has rapidly grown in popularity over the last few years. This has been so due to the process of “Cultural Hegemony” by the American food industry. They have successfully incorporated and reinterpreted Mexican cuisine and relabeled it as “TexMex”, defined as an “earthy, happy, celebratory cuisine that was once peasant food but has now been elevated to a sophisticated art form.” The only problem with essays such as these is that it is hard to find the line between what is folklore and what is popular culture, which in turn makes the general message and theme of the essay harder to interpret. In this essay we are going to find that line in Montano’s essay and make it apparent in order to fully understand it. From what we know of folklore, we know that it is NOT popular culture. Popular culture refers to things that are heavily in demand by large groups of people for a definitively short period of time. It
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